MAXINE KUMIN of Warner, New Hampshire
Winner of the 2006 FROST MEDAL
The Final Poem
Bread Loaf, late August, the chemistry
of a New England fall already
inviting the swamp maples to flare.
Magisterial in the white wicker rocker
Robert Frost at rest after giving
a savage reading
holding nothing back, his rage
at dying, not yet, as he barged
his chair forth, then back, don't sit
there mumbling in the shadows, call
yourselves poets? All
but a handful scattered. Fate
rearranged us happy few at his feet.
He rocked us until midnight. I took
away these close-lipped dicta. Look
up from the page. Pause between poems.
Say something about the next one.
Otherwise the audience
will coast, they can't take in
half of what you're giving them.
Reaching for the knob of his cane
he rose, and flung this exit line:
Make every poem your final poem.
William Louis-Dreyfus, President, PSA Board of Governors, on Maxine Kumin
There is a tendency, perhaps especially in our times, to classify poets in groups of similarity and influence. So it has been said of Maxine Kumin that she emerges from the movement that gave us Sexton and Plath and Adrienne Rich, that she is a confessional poet like Lowell because of the autobiographical starting point of many of her poems, that she is, like Frost, attentive to the rural rhythms of life or like Elizabeth Bishop in the precision of her detail. All of that may have its relevance, but it is not a central truth. She is a poet whose womanhood is an expanse to her poetry not merely a subject of it. She resembles Frost in her clarity and she is confessional only by way of connecting narrow dots to the broad universe—that is, not at all. Good poetry defies definition. Perhaps it is what results from the degree of accuracy with which something is said—the more acute, the more concentrated, the more extreme the accuracy, the more superb the poetry and the more extreme is the good of the poetry. It is an honor for the PSA to award the Frost Medal to this extreme poet, Maxine Kumin.
The Frost Medal is awarded annually at the discretion of the Board of Governors of the PSA for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry. The $2,500 prize is provided by a contribution from Jack Stadler, PSA Treasurer Emeritus.
GEORGE STANLEY of Vancouver, British Columbia
Winner of the SHELLEY MEMORIAL AWARD
Veracruz
In Veracruz, city of breezes & sailors & loud birds,
an old man, I walked the Malecón by the sea,
and I thought of my father, who when a young man
had walked the Malecón in Havana, dreaming of Brazil,
and I wished he had gone to Brazil
& learned magic,
and I wished my father had come back to San Francisco
armed with Brazilian magic, & that he had married
not my mother, but her brother, whom he truly loved.
I wish my father had, like Tiresias, changed himself into a woman,
& that he had been impregnated by my uncle, & given birth to me as a girl.
I wish that I had grown up in San Francisco as a girl,
atall, serious girl,
& that eventually I had come to Veracruz,
& walking on the Malecón, I had met a sailor,
a Mexican sailor or a sailor from some other country—
maybe a Brazilian sailor,
& that he had married me, & I had become pregnant
by him,
so that I could give birth at last to my son—the boy
I love.
Sonia Sanchez and Joshua Clover on George Stanley
George Stanley's poems often take place in bars; he's like Charles Bukowski, had Bukowski been a few years younger, a former student of Jack Spicer, queer, brilliant, an expat who departed the United States for Canada during the Vietnam conflict, and honestly marginalized. Perhaps as a cumulative effect of all these causes, Stanley's poetry knows itself to be far from the center, and refuses to make claims on swaggering personality or fake immediacy; neither is he interested in effacing his own presence entirely, in the way of someone who has had quite enough of being the subject of the world.
These are negative claims, leading to the great negative claim: George Stanley sounds like nobody else. This is true, and rare, and leaves unstated what makes his poetry seem deserving of this award, given "with reference to...genius and need." So, to state it plainly: Stanley's capacity to grasp both the personal and the social, the local and the conceptual —and how they are always reaching for each other, dreaming of each other, failing each other and themselves—is surprising, moving, seductive. It functions as a kind of diagnosis about contemporary poetry, and a vision of what it might do at this late hour; a poetry as eccentric as this moment is eccentric. In the words of noted poet-critic Christopher Nealon, Stanley's writing "has provoked me again and again to ask whether the name to give the struggle to bring together emotion and abstraction, to understand in tandem the intra-psychic and the global, is in fact 'poetics.'"
Stanley's poems lack all hermetic recalcitrance. They are compellingly direct, as dreams are compellingly direct, from early pieces like 1960's "White Matches" through the last entry in the recent volume of selected poems, A Tall, Serious Girl. That 18-line poem, "Veracruz," captures without parallel the fluidity of imagination—and the melancholy of a free imagination's role in the bound world. It's a love poem like no other love poem— the sort of writing that makes it a strange and desperate pleasure to read George Stanley's work, and a secondary but great pleasure to award him this prize.
The Shelley Memorial Awardof more than $3,500, established by the will of the late Mary P. Sears, is given to a living American poet selected with reference to genius and need.
NICOLE COOLEY of Glen Ridge, New Jersey
Winner of THE WRITER MAGAZINE/EMILY DICKINSON AWARD
In the Anatomical Museum
Past the skull collection, wax model of a gangrene hand
in a specimen jar to the "Plates Illustrative of a Treatise on Midwifery, 1813"—
Leonet forceps, decapitating hook "used to extract the child
by the head from the maternal passage"
Or the umbilical cord with 26 twists. Or the placenta molded from paraffin.
I am looking for the Labor Scene.
Not the instruments: blade, shank, lock: but the women
holding each other, the women delivering—
Not my dream last night that I was pregnant for the third time
but there was no baby
there would be no "obstetrical interventions" to remove this body
from my body. I would not go down to that place
I'd traveled twice. I would not return
to Cervadil, Pitocin drip, to the birthing room where I had failed,
lifted off the bed on a rubber sheet and wheeled to the surgical theater
where the nurses tied down my hands
where I breathed the plastic shell of an oxygen mask.
On the second floor the curator draped
a wax model in muslin to resemble a patient on a table,
body for the surgeon to unfold. That place I'd traveled—
a hundred years ago I would not have come back—
Now my two girls running on the lawn beyond
the museum, behind the black gate, my girls
who refuse to be bodiless.
Gerald Stern on Nicole Cooley
I like this poem because of its fullness, its depth of feeling, its precision, its courage to explore the unknown and its abiding mystery—all of these are qualities that this poet shares with Dickinson, plus the jarring unusual nature of the poem, plus its inconclusive resolution coupled with an aesthetically conclusive ending.
I like also that is doesn't try to imitate the language or strategy of Dickinson but rather emulates her spirit. Deep things are involved here, the eerie replicas, the terrifying dreams, the innocent enduring daughters. This is a real poem and a real poet.
THE WRITER/Emily Dickinson Award of $250 was established in honor of Charles Angoff for a poem inspired by Emily Dickinson.
RUSTY MORRISON of Richmond, California
Winner of the CECIL HEMLEY MEMORIAL AWARD
from Sky Clutches Any Strong Beat
1. Repeating verdancy
Ask our eyes for this avenue of aspen, assembly unnecessary, each step annotated separately
Blink and we'll have ambered it; the occasion was sunset, now only judgment slips into this
last slit as atmosphere
The vista foreshortens into seamless tricks of stealth
I said yearning, but the aspen are already milked down to their whitest drapery
I say open, but the valley backs away from us behind its wan smile, a once-close friend, I'm
not asking the amphitheater to get physical
With ruse of onyx, still no flesh beneath our night-skin; say body with every orifice, hear
only echo in shine's underbreath
Now all recognizable accents sliding off the actual
Instinct, commonly frightened by the least missed-rhyme, snaps off at its stem
Within the smallest waterdrop, a heated rustling, till all its mirrors splay
We must stop arguing about the planning of rocks to fill up our substance
Bullying our distinguishing marks
Be easier on the un-emphatic syllable
As if a breach synthesized its two sides, its strong emptiness
So will each long-shut resemblance begin again to ovulate
2. Verdancies of repetition
Thickly into the nearness of dusk, the tests we use, fingers and faces, singed at the edges and
falsely positive
Thickly, comes some less definable nearness, unfixed at its low frequency, culling from us
teeth, thorns, talons
At least not our loneliness; what nature allows us, our rumors and privacies, our needful
decorations
Your answer, tonight wetly discoloured, still it shines like new plumage
Had I left you, had I found you; wind as the audience we play to; while land, the final
listener, dutifully amasses its quiet attention
Our interpretation of green, obviously unconvincing
In the reflection of my rippled and preening vigilance, you see only your own little folds
and flaps, your mating dance, a strong breeze of inaction
Toss consonants against the vowels for luck of true correspondence
Rhyme-fellows remain distinct only in a distance, two wings framing the jay's flight
Harbor the hidden accentual in the beautiful repose after our vowelling
Whistled up a sky between whip-scaped and whelmed
There are auditory niches, hear nothing of the electrical storm's hemorrhaging, then be
nearly deafened by the reverb of a cricket's wing-scratch
All consecrated into nettle if not narrative, widening out our vexed eventual
Struck again and again, destiny might never rhyme for us, not even once
Cal Bedient on Rusty Morrison
"Sky Clutches Any Strong Beat" ambles through its subtle, leafy long lines as if unaware of their strong surprise; it inhabits originality without any self-consciousness at all. A species of vespers, it seizes on what's left to emphasize back into distinctness as if in the last moment of the day; it floats a delicate and wavering balance between the dusk that would subtract everything from itself and what keeps adding itself even in our "vexed eventual": "a cricket's wing-scratch," "the sound of slowness as slowness comes upon a thing," our "privacies, our needful decorations," and much more. Its subtitles formpairs of inverted terms (e.g., "Repeating verdancy," "Verdancies of repetition"), in keeping with its attention to time's "two sides," as well as its layaway plan that "each long-shut resemblance [will] begin again to ovulate." The poem is open to swings of inflection throughout; it's splendidly searching and various. It doesn't want to be summarized, it intends to be equal to everything. And in that great ambition it can't be said to fail.
The Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of $500 was established by Jack Stadler and his late wife, Ralynn Stadler, for a lyric poem that addresses a philosophical or epistemological concern.
ALICE JONES of Oakland, California
Winner of the LYRIC POETRY AWARD
Valle d'Aosta
Angelic cow bells rise up from the valleys
long before the cows appear in the mountains,
a random music, like unstill water,
coming up from the cold trenches to islands
of warmth on the high slopes beyond cities'
sound, the low brass notes speak an animal sorrow
and when we're descending we feel the sorrow
as our own. After a day of altitude, the valley's
pulling us homeward toward the trek's end, a city's
black and gold spangled night, but in the mountains
we are still just bodies walking through islands
of time. Lunch: bread and salmon, plums and water,
restored for the afternoon, low on precious water
we remember the day we hadn't filled up, our sorrow
about how many euros per bottle at one of those islands
of civilization, a lift station, liftless. The valley's
reachable by foot, no rides in September's mountains,
the funivia is closed for repairs and tomorrow the city's
lights won't disappear as we leave the five little cities
and ascend, carried up over ridges and ibex, water—
heavy fog surrounds us, we're lost in the mountains,
cloud-bound. A stone marker, some climber's sorrow,
there must be a trail here somewhere to the valley's
moss, we examine rocks for the red/white marks, islands
of logic, a map in the sea of granite islands
above the fog-floor, chirring marmots inhabit cities
of boulders. We've been absorbed into time's valleys,
it wears a different form up here, like water
it pools and sluices over, spills into sleep, old sorrows,
into crevices between memory and the absent mountains
of a flatland childhood. Before we ever saw mountains
we imagined them, heaps of gravel and snow, islands
floating above all we knew, the everyday pains, sorrows
of what people unknowingly do to each other, cities
of starvation, neglect, battles, bacteria in black water,
battered shells of children looking for some warm valley,
a home from which to wander into valleys, mountains
and glaciers, melted turquoise water, muddy islands
of human cities, moving out of and into blunt sorrow.
(The end-words are taken from W.H. Auden's "Paysage Moralisé")
Toi Derricotte on Alice Jones
I love this beautiful sestina for so many reasons but, most of all, for its perfect balance of form and content.
The story meanders almost leisurely through a passing day between friends hiking the Valle d'Aosta as they find their way down. The poet says, "in the mountains/ we are still just bodies walking through islands/ of time." Each stanza is an island of time in the descent, and the repeated words connect and anchor them. The form is never forced; rather, it creates a cycle of understanding, the words gathering other meanings, so that, as the couple descends, the poet's vision becomes broader and takes more in, "crevices between memory and the absent mountains/ of a flatland childhood." This contrasting movement creates a lovely tension. By the end, the poet makes connections to our vaster sorrows.
There is a gentle wisdom and maturity in the voice. In the penultimate stanza, when the poet comes to "the everyday pains, sorrows/ of what people unknowingly do to each other," there is forgiveness and compassion for the past, and an acceptance of our part in the most terrible events. At the same time, the poem is a validation of our desire and ability to possess beauty.
The Lyric Poetry Award of $500 was established under the will of Mrs. Consuelo Ford (Althea Urn), and also in memory of Mary Carolyn Davies, for a lyric poem on any subject.
LYNNE KNIGHT of Berkeley, California
Winner of the LUCILLE MEDWICK MEMORIAL AWARD
Recovery
Anarrow road, the rumble of a wide cart,
dust rising in ghosts around the horse, neighing,
faintly, under the weight of the household,
blankets and rugs, roped-together utensils.
The man, woman and child walk behind
toward green, toward water.
*
Hunger enters the body. It carves a deep cave
near the heart. When night comes,
it makes forays into the dreaming mind:
low-flying birds appear, even their wings
a succulence. Then day again. Morecarving.
It strikes against bone. The brain hears a distant ringing.
For answer, hunger carves deeper. The bones
seem a frenzy of sticks in the wind. Birds cry: no:
the body, mouth open, while nothing shoves
its way back and forth among the ribs.
*
The horse staggers, its bones a frenzy
in the wind. The child holds a stick
like a wand: makes night come with its cape
of glittering holes. Beside her in the cart
her mother and father make the shape of a horse,
of a cloud rearing into a horse, but their grunts
remind her of the pig at the trough,
pig they ate to the last bone,
her mother weeping silently.
*
They lose count of the days, dreaming toward water.
Then a boat. A long passage. Sickness, groaning,
and in the night the heavy splash of the dead
wrapped and tied and let slide into the waves.
The child holds her hand in the air like a stick,
like a wand: makes night tear apart into land.
Over and over she does this, and one day it works:
The green is almost blinding. Eliza, the man cries,
Eliza. The child makes the wand sprinkle life
on her mother's hand, her mother's foot.
Wind brings green from the trees to her lungs.
*
The child forgets almost everything about this.
She is told stories bearing her name, and she makes them
into a book, many books, whose pages turn
like waves into water. But whenever she finds a stick
that resembles a wand, she breaks it in two.
She runs through fields that never turn into dust.
*
One day someone bearing her hands and feet
decides to remember: hunger.
She lets it carve where it will. Empty fields
spread from rib to rib. Dust spills from the backs
of her eyes. There's no way to know dream from waking.
She feels small, light, she travels the surface
of the earth without displacing so much as a stone,
as the dead are said to travel the surface of water.
Her bones ring. She can barely hold one
hand in the other. Come, she tells herself.
She walks by fields that fill with green like water.
She walks into years, across earth
that changes even as the night sky
remains the same. She enters the room
where I sit waiting. Hunger so old it feels
ancestral. Eat, I tell her. Live.
Grace Schulman on Lynne Knight
The author of "Recovery," a poet unknown to me at this writing, has taken on the difficult subject of a family forced to flee home, weak with hunger, possessions heaped on a horse cart. In the poet's hands, this displaced family becomes everybody's family, and the theme grows into exile from the beginning of time. What accomplishes the transformation are the musical lines, the masterful repetition of key phrases—and beyond that, a miracle. I read it and fall silent, amazed.
The Lucille Medwick Memorial Award of $500 was established by Maury Medwick in memory of his wife, the poet and editor, for an original poem in any form on a humanitarian theme.
G.C. WALDREP of Deep Springs, California
Winner of the ALICE FAY DI CASTAGNOLA AWARD
WHO IS JOSQUIN DES PREZ
A little winter, a drop at winter, a descent and then a steeper dwindling in the depths of winter, a snowdrop. A small sketch. A snowdrop signals the end of one thing and the beginning of another, a wider imprecation. How do you do. How does one do. A snowdrop reminds.
To begin. There is a market, there is buying and selling, there is that proverbial marrying and being given in marriage as one joins another. And suits this action, as from field, as from the space defined within a field, as from a white flag. Sixteen cents allowing for the anachronism which is a necessary liberty as with marriage as with may I hold you, may I kiss your lips, may I move my hand between your cheek and neck, between your neck and the basin of your shoulders. May I purchase this felt hat. Yes thank you.
In the road they were married and marrying. In the mud and dung which were frozen it being winter, or almost winter, or barely yet winter signaling outward to some different season. Some on horseback, some on foot. They were not thinking of dying. They were trading places with the dead, this is continual, this from moment to moment is what we call life. Some were some were not thinking of money. Some were not thinking of sleep.
What is sleep. Sleep is the penetration of value by a perfect means. In any resurrection there may be doubts, there may be misgivings, there may well be interruptions, there may be the confidence of a period style. There may be distortion this may be one aim. Any performance is a rondeau and so not drawn from legacy. Any performance is provisional, as pence for francs or dollars for rubles. (See What is ballet.)
If one cannot imagine a snowdrop then one might imagine its absence. A snowdrop as its own absence, a snowdrop is its own absence, a snowdrop absent. A snowdrop. White on white / on white.
Forrest Gander on G.C. Waldrep
Purportedly structured in the manner of a "gamut" or musical self-instruction manual, Archicembalo features lapidary prose poems notable for their gorgeously orchestrated rhythmic pulse, their prosodic patterning, and their subtle melodic figuration. With fluent shifts from normative syntax to fragment to question-and-answer, from arpeggiated single words to lush sequences of clauses, the poems are as intricate as the mouth-parts of a sea urchin. The diction, imaginative and rich, limns a world that is as strange as it is familiar. Milton's Satan's description of a "lowest depth" in which a still "lower deep...opens wide" comes to mind; but the depths of these poems open laterally and we want to keep entering.
The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award of $1,000 is offered in memory of a benefactor and friend of the PSA for a manuscript in progress. This award is partially endowed by the Estate of Rachel Dalven.
KATHERINE BROWNING New York, New York
Winner of the LOUISE LOUIS/EMILY F. BOURNE STUDENT POETRY AWARD
to discover the cartography of blankness
I've recently acquired a style of writing (burnished it into being) that snakes like a twisting serpent down the
page: aided by parenthesis and semicolon, disappearing for a moment
when the paragraph changes like some great jungle cat that slips behind a tree. It never quite goes where
you're expecting; a skip's inserted like a linebreak
so that I'm still not sure whether to call this prose or poetry or something in-between (a teacher of Greek who
once taught me—and will again this summer—had a word for it,
or rather for the great, sprawling poems of Hesiod and Homer: proem, and may its coinage bear us both to sit
among the Muses as the ancient poets do). It is more modern a form than not,
however classical its content, natu more machina than dea (alas for Vergil): hand-crafted in that
quintessentially modern way that took the verb rescribo out of language, or would have
if the Romans (eheu fugaces labuntur anni, labuntur Romani) had not been dead ten centuries, ten score of
centuries; instead we have the word rewrite which has come to mean
that essentially artistic process of adding a comma here, a synonym there: deleting even entire paragraphs
because thank the Lord (Bill Gates) you can do that now
without the theft of secretaries from their crying, imperious children and crease-faced husbands and footbaths
filled with steaming water (and if that order's off, the bath stays at the end:
longest-deferred, most eagerly-awaited) to retype the last damn sixty pages of your doctoral thesis: and your
career in academia's been saved (by Mr. Gates, that college drop-out),
because if it had meant any more work at this point, you would have said to Hell with it, all of it, and tossed
the whole damn ream-and-a-half in a convenient trashcan—
and Sesame Street, you think, had one thing right: if anything's going to come popping out of that trash can
later, to talk back at you, it's a hell of a lot more likely to be Oscar the Grouch
than your thesis, though god knows it has a (grouchy-enough) voice of its own by now, nasal and New-Jersey
accented and just. You hate people from New Jersey, you tell me,
inimitably, cheerfully and perennially a snob: and I realize that Oh god—not le bon Gates this time—it's me,
this is who I'll be in twenty years—no, ten—no, five—talking to myself, the Ghost of Christmas Past,
watching my (former) self with the bitter eyes of a hungry tiger, the tiger who stalks up and down between,
behind, in front of the concealing tree-trunks of the jungle, the menacing foggy blankness
of the paper, which swallows both you and I and we and me and myself, all one of us, and (once again like
Homer) I am blind before it, catching blindly to the beast
of my subconscious (to its tail) and trusting it to blaze me a trail, make tracks of ink-black impeccability
around the trees outlined in white upon this pristine wilderness. Let us make a song,
let it wind around itself, its listeners, like a fugue, and delineate by its absences the long white rows (tall white
columns of birches) upon the paper, draw us a map
of the no-man's land that you and I and we all strive to avoid, writing (and running away from) our theses and
essays and poems whose contours must all be drawn upon, drawn from
the pristine wilderness (a sheet of paper) in (my finest hand, Joni Mitchell sings, that golden child of
Woodstock: too golden-young to ever have known white, that paralyzing white
like snow, snow that never dared show its face while those ephemeral perennial days lasted and lasted on)
some style of writing or another; anthropomorphize that how you will.
Prageeta Sharma on Katherine Browning
In "to discover the cartography of blankness" the speaker confronts a "new style of writing that snakes like a twisting serpent." Certainly, the speaker calls attention to this style all the way through by enacting it in the poem as well as problematizing it. The poem seems to me a combination of a "sprawling" couplet and yet the promisingly full experience of open verse: full of excess, long lines culminating in twists and bends; yet still coveting an internal rhyme—a formalism the speaker relies on.
While parts of this poem explore a fun, lofty voice—I find the speaker happily exploring the confines of the page and the excitement of meandering, topically, all of the problems with self-expression. The poem combines Ginsberg with Pound, the "student thesis" with Microsoft, and all of the poets it can think up along the way (Homer, Hesiod, and Vergil). It was so much fun to find this voice which seems unafraid of where it travels and where (through writing) it will go next.
The Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award of $250 is endowed by the wills of Louise Louis Whitbread and Ruth M. Bourne and is given for the best poem by a poet of high-school age from the United States.
KEVIN PRUFER of Warrensburg, Missouri
Winner of the GEORGE BOGIN MEMORIAL AWARD
National Anthem
And the shopping center said, give me, give me.
And the moon turning on its pole said, I love you, you who have so much to give.
And you said, darling, if you could just wait in the car for ten minutes and I'll be right
out—
And the sliding doors opened for you like a coat.
Then the car ticked like the contented in the catatonic snow
and the black boys at the bus stop laughed in their hoods until a bus dragged them
through the night and away—
And a woman paced beneath the store.
Sometimes, I can hear the nation speak through the accumulation of the suburbs—
Olive Garden and Exxon; Bed, Bath & Beyond, the stars that throw their dimes
around us all
until the eyes say Love and the streets say Yes! and the parking lot
fills with angels blowing past the lines of freezing cars.
You had been inside for longer than you said, and when you reemerged
I went to help you with the bags. I'm sorry, sorry—into the cold air—I couldn't help—
What was the body but a vessel, and what was the store but another,
larger vessel? The keys sang in my numb fingers. The flag applauded in the wind.
And then I saw that you were smiling up at it.
Marie Howe on Kevin Prufer
I kept coming back to look at these poems—the way you look at an accident on the road, craning your neck as you approach—until—passing the flashing lights—you see it's your car—your own car that's smashed, holding up traffic.
Kevin Prufer's got steady nerves—from deep inside here and now, from within the American Empire, he is listening to the memory of the future. He has courage and com- passion. And he places words so beautiful and accurate and terrifying along a line you can't help but read to the end. At the end I looked up and said one word: more.
I want to thank him, celebrate him, and ask him something. Can he find a way out of here? I want him to read these poems on Fox News and CNN. Can this be a poet who can write the sentence we are, as a people, on the verge of saying? Reading his poems, it feels on the verge of coming to mind.
The George Bogin Memorial Award of $500 was established by the family and friends of George Bogin for a selection of four or five poems that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms.
DANEEN WARDROP of Kalamazoo, Michigan
Winner of the ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD
from Cyclorama
Cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg, Southwest Panel, Paul Philippoteaux, 1883
"When one reaches the platform from which the cyclorama is shown . . . he suddenly finds himself upon a high hill, with a stretch of forty miles of country all around him and everywhere within range of his vision, on the hills, in the valleys, in the woods, on the open fields, in ditches and behind stone walls, and in shot-shattered shanties he beholds the soldiers of the blue and gray engaged in the awful struggle . . ."—The Sunday Herald, Dec. 21, 1884
When we hold each other we might know where we're going.
My brother Robert Bird with his bandaged arm, me with wrapped thigh
leaning on him, leaning too on the crutch
that is a sword, smoke crowning us.
Blood doesn't run
under these tons of paint
but thumbs us under its weight,
and we stay in the panel. Better than some
panels lost in attics, moldy with blue,
or panels the Shoshone cut up to sew into tents—
they can see a battle again every day
as they bead capes and scrape elk hides—
horses ride behind their sleep.
My brother Robert and I, lucky,
alive, to lean on each other. Mustered the same day.
But none of the rest of our buddies are here—behind us
everyone still fights, but we're already bandaged. Pickett's on a horse
he never rode, in a charge I never saw, a battle I never fought.
The horse corpses we shuffle past, the partial orbs of wagon wheels.
We look and see the attack in the circle and around us
the circle looks and the attack is long and we
go round again.
On a platform in the middle a girl stands,
lips slack and eyes intent. Not
to cry. To try to take it in
and still be herself,
which of course she can't.
To the side of her, two returning soldiers weep,
and a mother tends the railing for balance.
Emerging from the oil, in front,
a blasted tree, part of a broken fence, clods of earth.
They know they could walk in and not bleed,
like us. They know that paint sways in the panels.
Know a million cries stitch us here.
They work hard not to betray us.
No matter where you look
the eye cannot but be filled with this.
Jean Valentine on Daneen Wardrop
Daneen Wardrop's Cyclorama is a sequence of poems about our Civil War, a long poem I could not take my eyes off.
Wardrop writes in an odd, moving, unique voice—that is, it is her own voice in the voices of black and white women, slave and free, the voices of soldiers, nurses and spies, in the voice of a child, in the voices of men soldiers, and of soldiers long ago painted in the Cyclorama. She draws from memoirs of the time as well as newspapers, Currier & Ives prints, the Cyclorama itself, and other sources who were witnesses of our family war.
This poet has made a work of suffering and beauty, which in its craft and in its huge heart does justice to Robert H. Winner and his Memorial Award.
The Robert H. Winner Memorial Award of $2,500, established by the family and friends of Robert H. Winner, directs attention to significant work written by someone in mid-life who has not had substantial recognition.
CAMMY THOMAS of Lexington, Massachusetts
Winner of the NORMA FARBER FIRST BOOK AWARD
from Cathedral of Wish
Hunting
his black days he fed us pheasant
shot in fields behind the house
mudroom shotgun oiled black
slick bolt pulled back
hung the birds
in the garage to season
trembled as he plucked
their blue-green plumes
oh it tasted tender
that darkest meat
squawk and talon
sometimes we spat a pellet or two
Medbh McGuckian on Cammy Thomas
Cathedral of Wish by Cammy Thomas is a difficult, possibly belated, certainly hard- earned, collection. A first book is nearly always autobiographical and personal, and this one is so burningly. These "gasps," for such they are, at the extremes of family brutality and shame, where only the italicized parental speeches are punctuated, reveal a painful story that is all too familiar, without self-pity, charting a male power and abuse so starkly as to be almost a political diagnosis. Infidelity is the crux of Shakespeare's sonnets and the central experience sublimated by Yeats: here the ambivalence is "anguish dimmed but with it, rapture." Other fine and noteworthy near-winners had more verbal ingenuity, more varied thematic density, yet none had quite this sustained and tragic unrelievedness, where what is not said is even more haunting than what is. If poetry has more to do with emotion than intellectuality, then this volume serves in that category.
The Norma Farber First Book Award of $500 was established by the family and friends of Norma Farber, poet and author of children's books, for a first book of original poetry written by an American. The winning book is distributed to PSA Angels and Benefactors.
BRENDA HILLMAN of Kensington, California
Winner of the WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD
from Pieces of Air in the Epic
Street Corner
There was an angle
where I went for
centuries not as a
self or feature but
exhaled as a knowing
brick tradesmen engineered for
blunt or close recall;
soundly there, meanings grew
past a second terror
finding their way as
evenings, hearing the peppermint
noise of sparrows landing
like spare dreams of
citizens where abstraction and
the real could merge.
We had crossed the
red forest; we had
recognized a weird lodge.
We could have said
song outlasts poetry, words
are breath bricks to
support the guardless singing
project. We could have
meant song outlasts poetry.
Marjorie Welish on Brenda Hillman
As advertised, Pieces of Air in the Epic takes much inspiration from the second element of cosmological imagination, for in this book of poems the element of air is not only a theme but a measure of prosody, not only a measure but an intervention in the poetic line that shapes words and disturbs the sentence. With tactical scruple, Brenda Hillman chooses the apt approach to construct a poem of document and lyric, testing one against the other. Textual sampling and collage appear in conjunction with a reimagining of fact through an ethical zone of anti-war activism that come to enrich and trouble poetic radiance.
Graced with Robert Duncan's tutelary spirit, each poem that Hillman writes creates its own experimental configuration, within which the phrase swerves and discombobulates sense, as several registers of subject complicate the sampling of experience and also as the experimental format throws the lyric into symbolist disarray one moment and naturalist scrutiny the next. And even more: she writes as if the lyric poem had a political calling.
The William Carlos Williams Award is a purchase prize of between $500 and $1000 for a book of poetry published by a small press, non-profit, or university press. The winning book is distributed to PSA Angels and Benefactors. The William Carlos Williams Award is endowed by the family and friends of Geraldine Clinton Little, a poet, author of short stories, and former Vice President of the PSA.
SUSAN BRIANTE is a poet, essayist, and translator, who lives in Austin, Texas. Her first collection of poetry, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press.
KATHERINE BROWNING is a junior at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York, where she has studied poetry with Marty Skoble since third grade. She has been selected to attend the New England Young Writers' Conference at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf campus this spring.
NICOLE COOLEY grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her first book of poetry, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press in 1996. Her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, about the Salem witch trials of 1692, came out in April 2004. She is an associate professor of English at Queens College—CUNY and lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young daughters.
AMY DRYANSKY's poems appear in many journals and anthologies, and she has been awarded fellowships to attend the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Villa Montalvo, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Five College Women's Studies Research Center at Mt. Holyoke College. Her first book, How I Got Lost So Close to Home (1999), won the New York/New England award from Alice James Books. She lives in Conway, Massachusetts.
BRENDA HILLMAN serves on the faculty of Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs; she is also a member of the permanent faculties of Napa Valley Writers' Conference and of Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her seven collections of poetry include Death Tractates (Wesleyan, 1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001), and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005). She has also written three chapbooks, edited an edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, has co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). Awards Hillman has received include Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
JOHN ISLES is the author of Ark (University of Iowa, 2003). In 2005, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and won the Ruskin Art Club prize from The Los Angeles Review. His poems appear in such magazines as American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Electronic Poetry Review, The Los Angeles Review, Phoebe, Pleiades, and Zyzzyva. He is currently teaching English at City College of San Francisco and lives in Alameda, California, with his wife, the poet Kristen Hanlon, and son, Liam.
ALICE JONES's books from Alice James Books are The Knot, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award in 1992, and Isthmus (2000), winner of the Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award. Extreme Directions: The Fifty-Four Moves of Tai Chi Sword was published by Omnidawn Press in 2002. Gorgeous Mourning was published by Apogee Press in 2004. Poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, VOLT, Zyzzyva, Best American Poetry 1994, and Blood and Bone: Poems by Physicians. She is a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and a co-editor of Apogee Press.
LYNNE KNIGHT is the author of three collections of poetry: Dissolving Borders, which won a Quarterly Review of Literature award in 1996; The Book of Common Betrayals, which won the Dorothy Brunsman Award from Bear Star Press in 2002; and Night in the Shape of a Mirror, a sequence on her mother's decline into dementia, which was published by David Robert Books in 2006. She lives in Berkeley, California.
MAXINE KUMIN's fifteenth poetry collection, Jack and Other New Poems, appeared in 2005 in her 80th year. Her Selected Poems: 1960-1990 (Norton, 1997) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1997. In 1994, Looking for Luck won the Poets' Prize; the following year, it was awarded the Aiken Taylor Poetry Prize. Her other awards include the Ruth E. Lilly Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Harvard Arts Medal for 2005. She served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (now titled Poet Laureate) in 1980-81. The universities at which she has taught include Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, and Brandeis. She has also served on the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conference faculties. Kumin is now distinguished poet in residence at the New England College M.F.A. in Poetry program. She and her husband live with their dogs on a horse farm in central New Hampshire, where for many years they bred and raised Arabians and competed in distance rides.
JILL MCDONOUGH is the recipient of fellowships from the Boston Athenaeum, the Fine Arts Work Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. She teaches writing for Boston University's Prison Education Program. Her work has appeared in Slate, The Threepenny Review, and Poetry; this fall she will be a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
WAYNE MILLER is the author of a book of poems, Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006), and a chapbook, What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Green Tower, 2005). He is also co-translator of I Don't Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007), a poetry collection by Albanian poet Moikom Zeqo, and co-editor (with Kevin Prufer) of The New European Poetry (Graywolf, 2008). Wayne teaches at Central Missouri State University, where he co-edits Pleiades.
RUSTY MORRISON's collection, Whethering (Center for Literary Publishing, 2005) won the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry. She was co-winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2003 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award, and the 2003 Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize. A poem of hers has been selected to be reprinted in the Gertrude Stein Awards (2005-06 edition), to be published by Green Integer Press. Her poems and/or essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, First Intensity, New American Writing, Rain Taxi, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing, one of five editors of the poetry journal 26, which is affiliated with Saint Mary's College, and she is a contributing editor for Poetry Flash.
ETHAN PAQUIN is the author of three books of poems, The Makeshift (United Kingdom: Stride, 2002), Accumulus (Salt, 2003), and The Violence (Ahsahta, 2005). He is founder and editor of Slope and Slope Editions. A native of New Hampshire, he lives in Buffalo, New York, where he is Assistant Professor of English and director of creative writing at Medaille College.
KEVIN PRUFER is the author of Fallen From A Chariot (Carnegie Mellon, 2005) and The Finger Bone (2002), a Laughlin Award finalist. With Wayne Miller, he is currently editing The New European Poetry for Graywolf Press. Editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, Prufer lives in rural Missouri.
EMILY ROSKO is a recipient of the Stegner Fellowship, the 2002 Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Javits Fellowship. She is currently earning a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her debut poetry collection, Raw Goods Inventory, won the 2005 Iowa Poetry Prize.
AARON SHURIN is the author of a dozen books, including the poetry collections Involuntary Lyrics (Omnidawn, 2005), and The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1999), as well as the acclaimed collection of essays, Unbound: A Book of AIDS (Sun & Moon, 1997). His work has appeared in over twenty national and international anthologies, and has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Shurin co-directs the M.F.A. in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.
GEORGE STANLEY was born into an Irish Catholic family in San Francisco in 1934. After briefly attending the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (1952-53), enlisting in the U.S. Army (1953-56), and returning to San Francisco, he met Jack Spicer in 1957. Having showed Spicer a copy of his poem "Pablito at the Corrida," Stanley was invited to join the Magic Workshop, which Spicer had just created at the San Francisco Public Library. There he met Robert Duncan, who, along with Jack Spicer, became his mentor. In 1971, he moved to Vancouver where he worked temporary jobs in bookstores and warehouses until, in 1976, he was hired to teach English at Northwest Community College in Terrace, British Columbia, where he remained until 1991. After leaving Terrace—which Stanley calls his second Rome—he took a teaching position at Capilano College in Vancouver, which he would hold for eleven years. George Stanley is now retired and lives in Vancouver. His works include Opening Day (Oolichan, 1983), Gentle Northern Summer (New Star, 1995), A Tall, Serious Girl: Selected Poems 1957- 2000 (Qua Books, 2003), and most recently, the chapbook Seniors (Nomados, 2006).
CAMMY THOMAS is the author of Cathedral of Wish, published in 2005 by Four Way Books. Her poems have appeared in Agenda, Marlboro Review, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Sahara, Perihelion, Blaze, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College, and a Ph.D. in English from Berkeley, where she specialized in Victorian poetry. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters, and teaches English at Concord Academy.
J. C. Todd's poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Shade 2004, RUNES and are forthcoming in Wild River Review. Her chapbooks, Nightshade (1995, 2000) and Entering Pisces (1985), are published by Pine Press. As an associate editor of The Drunken Boat, she has edited translation features on Lithuanian and Latvian poetry. She has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Baltic Centre (Sweden), and Schloss Wiepersdorf (Germany), two Leeway Foundation awards and five Pushcart Prize nominations. She is on the creative writing faculty of Bryn Mawr College. Her M.F.A. is from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
G.C. WALDREP's books of poems are Goldbeater's Skin (Center for Literary Publishing, 2004), which won the 2003 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Disclamor (BOA Editions, forthcoming 2007), and a chapbook, The Batteries (New Michigan Press, 2006). In 2005-06 he served as a visiting professor of history & poetry at Deep Springs College in California.
DANEEN WARDROP's poetry has appeared in Seneca Review, TriQuarterly, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Carolina Quarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Bentley Prize for Poetry from Seattle Review, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and has authored two books of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson's Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge (University of Iowa, 1996).
CAL BEDIENT is the author of four books of literary criticism, including He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and its Protagonist (University of Chicago, 1986), and two collections of poetry: Candy Necklace (Wesleyan, 1997) and The Violence of the Morning (University of Georgia, 2002). He has published essays and reviews in many magazines, including Boston Review, Colorado Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and Salmagundi. He is a co-editor of the New California Poetry Series and an associate editor of VOLT magazine. He has been a nominating juror for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and a judge for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Having long taught in the English Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, he has also been a visiting instructor at Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
JOSHUA CLOVER is the author of The Matrix (British Film Institute, 2005) and Madonna Anno Domini (Louisiana State University Press, 1997). He is Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Davis, and contributes to the Village Voice and The New York Times.
TOI DERRICOTTE is the author of The Black Notebooks (Norton, 1998), Tender (Pittsburgh, 1998), Captivity (1990), Natural Birth (Crossing Press/Firebrand, 1983 and 2000), and Empress of the Death House (Lotus Press, 1978). She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and two Pushcart Prizes. She is the recipient of the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award in nonfiction, and was nominated for the PEN Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. The Black Notebooks was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is co-founder of Cave Canem, the historic first workshop/retreat for African American poets. She is professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
FORREST GANDER is the author of numerous books of poems, essays, and translations including Eye Against Eye (New Directions, 2005), and Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, & Transcendence (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005). His recent translations include Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho (forthcoming from New Directions), and No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura López Colomé (Graywolf, 2002). With Kent Johnson, Gander translated Imminent Visitor: The Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (California, 2002). The recipient of a Whiting Award for Writers, the Howard Foundation Award, National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Writing, Gander has authored critical essays for numerous journals, including The Nation, Boston Review, and The Providence Journal. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University in Rhode Island.
MARIE HOWE is the author of two books of poems—The Good Thief (Persea, 1988) and What The Living Do (Norton, 1999)—and the editor, with Michael Klein, of In The Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1995). Her third book of poems, The Coming of Ordinary Time will be out from W.W. Norton next year. She lives in NY and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.
WILLIAM LOUIS-DREYFUS is the President of the Poetry Society of America's Board of Governors.
MEDBH MCGUCKIAN was born, and lives, in Belfast. She is currently teaching at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, and her work is published by Gallery Press and Wake Forest University Press. Her last collection, The Book of the Angel (Wake Forest, 2004), was dedicated to the memory of the late Gregory Peck, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Award.
SONIA SANCHEZ—poet, mother, activist, professor—is a national lecturer on Black Culture and Literature, Women's Liberation, peace and racial justice. She is the author of more than 16 books, including Homegirls and Handgrenades (Thunder's Mouth, 1984) which won the 1985 American Book Award, Under a Soprano Sky (Africa World Press, 1987), Wounded in the House of a Friend (Beacon Press, 1995), Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), and, most recently, Shake Loose My Skin: New & Selected Poems (1999). Her numerous honors and awards include a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Lucretia Mott Award for 1984, the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Humanities, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and the 2001 Frost Medal. In addition to lecturing at more than 500 universities and colleges in the United States and reading her poetry across the globe, Sonia Sanchez was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple University.
GRACE SCHULMAN's sixth collection of poems, The Broken String, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin in 2007. Her latest poetry books are The Paintings of Our Lives (2001) and Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (2002), both from Houghton Mifflin. Days of Wonder was a Finalist in the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Best Poems of that year. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Aiken Taylor Award for Poetry; the Delmore Schwartz Award for Poetry; the Distinguished Alumna Award from New York University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; three Pushcart Prizes for poetry; and a Poetry Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Schulman is editor of The Poems of Marianne Moore (Viking, 2003) and Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College—CUNY.
PRAGEETA SHARMA is the author of Bliss to Fill (subpress, 2000) and The Opening Question (Fencebooks, 2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Montana-Missoula. She also teaches in the low residency B.A. program at Goddard College and the Summer Humanities and Freedom program at Cambridge College in Massachusetts.
GERALD STERN was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1925 and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry including, This Time: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 1998), which won the National Book Award in 1998, and, most recently, Everything is Burning (2005). A collection of personal essays titled What I Can't Bear Losing: Notes From a Life was released in the fall of 2003, also by W.W. Norton. He has taught at many uni- versities including, University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, and for fifteen years was senior poet at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts for the State of Pennsylvania, the Lamont Poetry Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He was the first Poet Laureate of New Jersey, serving from 2000 to 2002. Gerald Stern was the recipient of the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry.
JEAN VALENTINE was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in NYC. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her other volumes include, Ordinary Things (FSG, 1974); Home Deep Blue (Alice James, 1989); The River at Wolf (1992); Growing Darkness, Growing Light (Carnegie Mellon, 1997); and The Cradle of Real (Wesleyan, 2000). Her latest collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 (2004), was awarded the National Book Award. She is also the recip- ient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York State Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts.
MARJORIE WELISH became the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University in 2005. A poet, painter, and critic, she is the author of Word Group (Coffee House Press, 2004) and The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems (2000). She is also the author of Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960 (Cambridge, 1999). A conference devoted to her writing and art held at the University of Pennsylvania has resulted in the volume Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books, 2003).
ELEANOR WILNER is the author of six collections of poetry, holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and serves as a contributing editor to Calyx. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Juniper Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at Warren Wilson College and lives in Philadelphia.
